“If a project was finished, but new things came up, should I just reopen the project and add a new activity or create a new project, instead?”

That’s a tricky one and, as you probably suspect, the answer is: “It depends.”

Let’s review some of the common scenarios and possible solutions.

One-time task

In fact, this is a very common case. You completed your project, your customer and stakeholders are happy and the pictures from the celebration party are all over Facebook (now you wish that Mark Zuckerberg never existed.)
All of a sudden you receive an email about one tiny, little, small thing that absolutely needs to be added to that project.

If you indeed believe that it’s going to be a one-off activity, then the best practice in this case would be to re-open the project and add new task there. This way you can save a lot of time, because all your project structure, team assignments, description, etc. is already there. So the new task is kept in context of the project.

New scope

What if that tiny, little, small thing will require at least few months of your team’s uninterrupted attention.
What do you do (other than murmuring curses under your breath)?

Under such circumstances in most cases it’s better to create a new project dealing with the new scope. This way it will easier for you to deal with scheduling and resource allocation aspects.

Another benefit is the team moral. Psychologically it’s very hard on people if the project never ends – there is no sense of accomplishment.

Maintenance

Another common scenario is ongoing maintenance. It can support for freshly built web-site, IT services for servers, community management for a marketing initiative, etc.

Our recommendation is to create a separate project called “Maintenance for…” and keep all support activities there. According to PMI it won’t be a project, since it doesn’t have defined end date and scope, but you know better than that. Of course it’s a project. You just won’t be recognized for doing a darn good job managing it.

Another possible approach is to create a general “Maintenance” place holder project for all initiatives. It can be useful for in-house projects, where maintenance tasks are rare and you don’t need to worry about billing the clients.

How do you deal with ongoing projects and extra scope? Please share your best practices with us.

This post is a part of our on-going Project Management 101 series.

People are not able to find time to work on a solution that will help them save time. That’s a Catch-22 in its purest form. So what can you do break out of it?

Here are 3 tips to assist you in this non-trivial task (full disclosure: we really, really want you to follow these tips, so you can find time to talk to us).

Tip #1: Decide on the goals and be specific.
It’s not enough to just say: we need project management software to be more effective. You need to be specific. You need to decide what exactly you’re trying to achieve. Do you want to save time? Too general – be more specific. For example, you might want to spend 50% less time creating project progress reports.
“We want our project managers to be more productive” – too general. A better goal: “we want to give our clients an ability to view their project status online, so project managers don’t have to email these reports back and forth.”

Tip #2: Get everyone on your team involved and incentivized.
If you’re the only one pushing for the change – you’re swimming against the current. Get your entire team on board. Explain how the new system will help them and make their life easier (See Tip #1). If needed – talk to your vendor, so they can suggest some best practices to make sure that everyone in the organization benefits from a project management software. Once you have your team’s support – you’ll find that it’s easier to find time, since you can share the responsibilities. Someone might take on product evaluation; others will iron out technical questions, etc.

Tip #3: Calculate the real cost of waiting.
This is the toughest one. Nobody wants to know the bad news. But the reality is that you already know it. You know that you need to improve the planning and tracking of your projects. Remember? You told us that! Now you need to put a value to it to make sure it really gets your attention or the attention of the decisions making powers in your organization.
What will it means in terms of dollars and cents if your team members can save only 15 minutes per day by having a more efficient way to manage their projects and tasks? On average project managers lose at least 30 minutes per day on email and phone communications that can be eliminated by having a central collaborative space for all project-related discussions, files and documents.

Based on our research and client interviews, for a team of 15 people with the average rate of $30/hour, the typical savings are $90/day. That doesn’t seem much, until you start adding it up: $450/week, $1,725/month, $20,700/year.

Think about it: every week you delay making that decision and putting out yet another fire, yet another $450 go down the drain. And the next week, and week after. Of course, your mileage can vary…

Bottom line: follow these steps (which are not easy by the way), break the cycle and finally find that time that eluded you before.

Do you have other tips that worked for your team – share them via the comment box.

This post is a part of our on-going Project Management 101 series.

The simplest usage scenario for portfolios is when you want to combine all your projects by department (e.g. IT, Marketing, Financial, etc.) or by business goals (e.g. Increase Revenue by 25%, Improve Customer Retention, etc.)

There are a number of benefits for grouping your projects together into a portfolio, in which case the combination of projects is now treated as single entity. For example:

• Easier to assess overall project group health metrics;
• Better control over resources, budget and costs;
• Simpler permission management (a portfolio manager can oversee all projects in a portfolio without being assigned to each and every project).

Different project management software tools may offer extra portfolio management options, for example, Easy Projects allows you to limit custom fields based on which portfolio the projects reside in. This way you can have one set of custom fields for all IT Projects and a different set of fields for your Financial projects.

Of course there are more sophisticated use cases for Portfolios like risk management, project investment strategy analysis and others used by larger enterprises, however these and similar techniques and methodologies maybe be overkill for a small and medium size teams and organizations.

If you’re using Portfolios in your project management activities, please share your practices in the Comments section below.

This post is a part of our on-going Project Management 101 series.

So let’s start with some definitions…

Estimated Hours – the amount of time you think it’s going to take someone to complete a task or a project.

Actual Hours – the real amount of time it took to finish that task or project.

Estimated Hours vs. Estimated Duration

Keep in mind that Estimated and Actual hours should not be confused with Estimated or Actual Duration. The latter is the number of calendar days that was planned/spent on a task.
Because people are usually working on multiple tasks at any given time, it’s quite common to see a situation when a task takes 3 days to complete (actual duration), but requires less than 8 hours of the actual efforts (actual hours).

In order to know the actual hours spent on a task, one should track their time. There are various ways and different tools to track time and we’ll certainly cover this topic in a future. But for now, let’s assume that you and your team have been recording your time religiously. That’s where Estimated Hours come into play and bring lots of benefits to you as a project manager. Here are the top 3…

Benefit #1: Preventing going over a budget

During the planning phase please make sure that your team provides estimated hours for each and every task in your project. Then you’ll be able to compare those numbers against running summary of the actual hours spent by your team and easily detect any possible budget overrun.

Benefit #2: Earned Value Analysis

A more advanced way to monitor your project health is to use a method called Earned Value Analysis (EVA). It takes into an account your project progress, estimated hours, actual hours and provides you with a visual indication of your project performance.

Benefit #3: Historical Data for Future Planning

The history of Estimated and Actual Hours for the completed projects is invaluable as a forecasting tool. There are many great use cases for it. Here are just a couple:

• Sometimes a new project comes along that is similar to what you already dealt with in the past. By reviewing the estimated and actual hours from the previous project you can learn from the past planning mistakes (if any) and provide a more accurate and realistic estimation this time.
• If you let the team members responsible for the tasks do their own estimation (which, by the way, is a very good practice), after a while you can learn how accurate they are with their estimates and add an appropriate amount of “padding” to their assessments. For some reason it’s always “add” and never “deduct”.

As you can see, using Estimated Hours properly is instrumental to your project success. So go ahead and try this practice with your next project!

Questions? Ask away using the comments section below.

This post is a part of our on-going Project Management 101 series.

E-mail really is a wonderful invention is it? It allows us to communicate with others, without the need for interruption.

For example – when I need to get an update on a project, or ask a question to my boss I’ve found that e-mails are my best solution. Rather than having to walk across the office, see if he’s busy, explain what I need etc, I can simply write everything out in a e-mail and he can respond when he has the time.

Of course there are some instances where it’s mission critical that I get a quick answer, but a majority of the time I’ll get my answer a few hours after I’ve written it. I’ve saved myself the hassle of having to check if he’s busy, I’ve also spared him the hassle of dropping whatever he’s working on to answer a question. This month I’d like to focus on this powerful tool, that sometimes gets overlooked in Easy Projects.

Currently, you can do the following with the e-mail notifications:

1. Create common notification rules
   You can create one rule (whom should get notified on which certain actions) and apply that to all of your projects.
2. Multiple notification rules per project
   As opposed to the common notification rule, you can create a series of rules for each project also.
3. Personalized e-mails to specific individuals
   Using the “Update Status” button found on the My Assignments page, you can write a personalized message to any assignee on the activity or any project team member
4. Downloadable templates
   All the e-mail notifications that are sent from the software can be editied and re-uploaded from Administration –> Settings –> Notifications –> Email Templates.
5. Tasks due for this week
   Easy Projects can e-mail you a list of all the tasks you are assigned to that are due for that week Simply go to My Options –> Notifications.
6. Compile all e-mail notifications into a single digest
   If you find that you are getting too many email notifications from the system, you can have them compiled into a single digest that will be sent at a specified intervals (example – every 4 hours).

Take care!

Here are 5 simple steps to create and structure your first project. We’ll use a sample project of creating and delivering a training course to illustrate these steps.

Step 1: Define Key Parameters

The first step in your process should be creating a “shell” for your project – its structure. Start by giving a good descriptive name to your project, define its goals and objectives and choose the team who will be working on it.
Keep in mind that none of it is set in stone and might change as your project progresses.

We recommend not to specify project end date manually, since the tasks that we will create later will automatically set the project deadline.

Step 2: Identify Major Milestones

For the purpose of this post let’s consider Milestone to be a task, completion of which indicates a significant progress towards the end of the project.

We have a dedicated blog post explaining in more details how to use milestones in a project:

In our example we’ll have 3 milestones:

• Research and create content
• Design presentation
• Deliver training

Same as with our project, let’s leave the deadlines for the milestones empty.

Step 3: Add Sub-tasks with Durations and Timelines

So far we’ve created a skeleton for our project. Now it’s time to add some meat to it.

We’ll create tasks (steps), required to complete each milestone. In addition to the name and description, we also recommend adding start dates along with duration in business days for each task. Also it might be useful to also specify estimated number of hours required to complete each task. It will help you track progress and allow you to be more accurate in the future by having a history of estimated vs. actual hours for the completed projects.

We recommend that the estimated time to complete each task should not exceed 16-20 hours. Otherwise it can be rather difficult to provide an accurate estimation. If it does exceed 20 hours – split it into sub-tasks. This way you will have a better control over the progress.

Step 4: Assign Team Members

Now let’s choose who will be responsible for each of the tasks. We recommend that you don’t assign people to the milestones and only to the sub-tasks.

Sometimes it makes sense to have multiple assignees for a task in case people will be sharing the workload, however if you want to be more granular in terms of the progress and responsibilities, then go with a single assignee per task.

You can also assign (book) shared resources like a projector at this step.

Step 5: Specify Dependencies

At this point we know all the tasks for our project, their duration and who will be working on them. In certain cases it makes sense to use dependencies.

Dependencies are particularly useful when the delays in one task can delay others and you want to be able to quickly re-calculate the entire project schedule when one of the tasks slips.

In our example, you cannot add content and screenshots to the presentation if the template is not ready yet.

Please note that once you introduce the dependencies, some of the previously defined dates might shift.

In this example, we’ll be using the simplest single “Finish to Start” dependency, however keep in mind that there other types that might be really useful under certain circumstances e.g. if you need plan your project backwards from a deadline.

Now we have our complete project schedule with correct dates, durations and assignees.

Congratulations, your project is ready! Next time we’ll talk about tracking its progress.

Here are the hot keys for Easy Projects Interactive Gantt Chart:


CTRL+ P = creates a new project (In Firefox)
CTRL+T = creates a new task (In Firefox)

CTRL+ALT+P – creates a new project (In IE)
CTRL+AT+T – creates a new task (In IE)
CTRL+ALT+D – deletes selected project/activity (In IE)
F2 enters edit mode in both FF and IE

Dependencies are used when a set of tasks must be worked on and closed in a specific order. For example, if your project involved building a website for a client, you would need their content before you could go live with the site.

When you have a hard target end date (deadline) that cannot be delayed, and you want to figure out when you need to start the project, you’ll need to use the “Start to Finish” dependency. First, you’ll need to put your tasks in the right sequence order, and know the duration for each task. For the previous example, let’s assume that developing content for the website will take 5 days, and designing the website will take 2 days and our hard target end date is April 30 2012.

Once we have our tasks laid out, we will state the end date of the Project (the deliverable date). Next we will place a “Start when Finish” dependency on all the corresponding tasks, working down up. As long as we place their end date, and the duration Easy Projects will auto-calculate their start dates.

Starting with the 2nd last activity, it will depend on the last activity, and will continue all the way up the steps. If the end date needs to be changed, we can simply change that start date and end date, which will change all the other start/end dates in the sequence.

If there are other scenarios you’d like to see written about, please let us know.

1. Create it as a single-day task to be used as marker on the project schedule, indicating that a certain objective is achieved;
2. Create it as a parent task, containing all other sub-tasks, which are required to complete a certain objective.

We recommend to use the 2nd method, because it allows you to better control your schedule and see what is left to be done in order to complete your milestone.
For example, if you’re rolling out a new web-site, you might have three major milestones:

• Create new design;
• Migrate content to the new design;
• Publish new web-site.

Then when you add all the required tasks to the corresponding milestones, your project schedule might look like this:

Later, it’ll be easy for you to check the status of your project progress by running the Milestone report.

Additional information is available in our Online Help:
http://www.easyprojects.net/help/index.html?project_milestones.htm

Questions? Ask away using the comments section below.

This post is a part of our on-going Project Management 101 series.

This option can be particularly useful when your project is quite complex with lots of tasks. In this case it’s advisable to use the hierarchy of sub-tasks and parent tasks to better organize your schedule.

Example:

Let’s say you’re producing a newsletter that has to be printed and sent to your clients. You have dozens of tasks on your plate. Some of them have to do with the content: writing the articles, reviewing the copy, etc. Some of them deal with the design and visual aspects; some are related to the printing process.

So to offer a better organization you can define your main categories and create them as parent activities, e.g. Articles, Photo and Illustrations, Assembly and Printing.

Then you make all other activities as sub-tasks for the appropriate parents:

Large / Long Activities

Another reason to use parent and child tasks if you originally defined only a few tasks, but each one of them can take many days, weeks or months to complete. Keep tracking of the progress can be a challenge in this scenario. So, by chopping your large tasks into smaller sub-tasks you’ll make it easier to keep track of deadlines and take corrective measures before it’s too late.

Multiple Assignees

Having multiple people responsible for a single task is another situation when it’s a good idea to use the hierarchy. The best practice is to define the parent task as a place holder and have each sub-task assigned to a single person for better tracking and accountability.

Additional information is available in our Online Help:
http://www.easyprojects.net/help/index.html?parent_activity_estimated_hour.htm

Questions? Ask away using the comments section below.

This post is a part of our on-going Project Management 101 series.